WESTERN STANDARD COLUMN: Reliance on Canadian Health Care May Kill You
Since 2019, SecondStreet.org has been collecting data on patients dying while waiting for services in Canada’s health care system.
One of the stories that inspired this research was Laura Hillier, an 18-year-old girl from Ontario who was battling leukemia.
Laura was diagnosed with a bone-marrow donor. To finally give her the upper hand in her fight, all she needed was a potentially life-saving surgery. Tragically, she never received it — the system forced Laura to wait more than seven months for treatment. She died in 2016. Our health care system let her down.
After hearing this heartbreaking story, SecondStreet.org wondered — how many other Canadians were dying before they could get the health care they needed? Was this simply a devastating one-off, or was this part of a larger, national story where people were falling through the cracks of our government-run health care system.
Unfortunately, the answer is now clear.
Since 2018, government data collected by SecondStreet.org shows there have been nearly 75,000 waiting lists deaths. This figure covers a wide array of procedures — everything from heart operations and cancer treatment, to procedures which could have improved a patient’s quality of life during their final years… things like cataract surgery and hip operations.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to calculate an accurate total as many health regions simply don’t track the data. Provincial governments will post online and tell the world if they discover — during a health inspection — that a local restaurant had a mouldy soup can in their fridge. But track how many patients died before receiving treatment? Apparently that’s not a priority. Quelle surprise.
Thus, the figure above is incomplete. Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador and most of Manitoba did not respond at all, while Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia only provided surgical data, not diagnostic.
Alberta, which used to respond to our requests annually, has since decided to stop tracking the data all together.
Had complete data been provided, the total above would likely double.
This is a national crisis.
With an estimated 5.1 million Canadians on wait lists right now, and the Fraser Institute’s recent reporting that health care wait times in Canada are at an all-time high, it’s a crisis that isn’t going to go away. The status quo is letting people down. Instead of learning from the tragic stories of people like Laura, the problem continues.
One solution that could help is to carefully track the data and disclose the details publicly — including how many patients died after waiting longer than the maximum recommended wait time for life-saving treatment. Nova Scotia used to release such analysis.
Second, Canadian provinces could copy a policy from the European Union called the “Cross Border Directive”. In short, if an EU patient can’t get the health care they need in their country, they have the right to be reimbursed for surgical costs abroad — up to what their home government would have spent to provide care locally. Instead of waiting years, a Canadian patient could get treated within weeks, at the same cost to taxpayers. A win-win in the clearest sense.
Rather than wait for the 2024-25 ‘Died on a Waiting List’ report to show this problem isn’t getting better, governments and policy makers should proceed with health reform now.
Harrison Fleming is the Legislative and Policy Director for SecondStreet.org, a Canadian think tank.
This column was originally published in The Western Standard on March 6, 2025.
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